Sunday, September 18, 2016

Macaroni Guilt

Hey, remember when I had a blog?
I seem to remember that was kind of neat, but then all sorts of stuff happened and I managed to drop off the face of the earth for six months or so. I'm sorry about that.

What happened was, roughly, this:

For the first couple of weeks after I wrote my last post, I was simply too sad to write, as I was trying very hard to find a way to function as a newly single person while still living with the person I had just singled myself off from, for three months, and most of those months were spent crying behind closed doors and being taken home by kind managers after throwing up in the bathroom at work and relearning how to do all the basic sort of life things with a hole in my heart. I also vaguely remember watching loads and loads of Buffy, up to a point where I can't be 100% sure which things happened to me during that time and which were written by Joss Whedon.

Then came the day when I finally got to move out and spend every waking hour of the next couple of weeks putting together the place that would become my new home, which turned out amazingly well. I honestly never thought I could ever love another place as much as the home I left behind, and I guess I never realized how much I missed having my own space that wasn't just a part of the living room. I wish there were a female equivalent term for "man cave", because that's really what I made for myself here. To celebrate this achievement I ordered a gigantic bulletin board, planning to turn it into an inspiration board, only around that same time I discovered in one of my boxes that I still had most of the shit I put up in my apartment when I was in my early twenties, and now it's full of old gig tickets and mementos and buttons and general Placebo related stuff. As you can imagine, I don't mind this at all. It was a fantastic way to reconnect with this little part of me I felt I'd lost, plus I get to live in a room that feels like it belongs to a teenager, only with the infinite wisdom of adulthood at my disposal!

My inspiration board turned into a regression board so quickly there was literally nothing I could have done.

The other thing that I put up there was the macaroni banner that I used for my blog, which I thought was a good idea at the time. This was before the first time I was suddenly hit in the face with a piece of macaroni. As the days grew hotter and more humid, I was regularly assaulted by falling macaroni as my banner slowly started to disintegrate, as if every falling piece was an accusation of neglect: "What about your blog, asshole?" *PAW* "You're inspiring nobody right now, dipshit!" *POK*
This was the beginning of my macaroni guilt, which I'm pretty certain is a kind of guilt not even my mom knows about.

This did not deter me in any way from ignoring it even further though, and then other kinds of things started to come into play whenever I thought about writing. Like how was I supposed to write about my life now without writing about the people from the community I was now a part of? I surely couldn't write about them, could I? I had always made it a point to only share stories that were my own, but now that I was living with so many people, did I even still have those? Who was I? WHERE DID I BEGIN AND END?

Then I started to freak out that everything I'd write would sound like it contained nothing but subliminal messages to my ex-boyfriend, which was even more ridiculous in hindsight, because he didn't even read my blog when we were together, and obsessively analyzing subtext has very much always been my thing, not his.
Then there was the time around June where I suddenly thought "Hey, I haven't thought about him in a while and I feel kind of ok", which promptly made me feel so guilty I could barely breathe, as if breaking up entailed some sacred pact that we would both be miserable for the rest of our lives. I managed to feel absolutely terrible for an entire week over that single thought, and not write about it once, macaroni guilt be damned.

That hat is a reminder of how much I love it when people humor me at parties.

After a while it got to a point where even the thought of writing anything made me feel like I had just eaten an entire turkey. If any of you emailed me during this period and I didn't get back to you: be assured I hate myself for this. There's few things that piss me off more than when people don't reply to my messages, and now I was turning into one of those inscrutable non-responder people myself, living in a vague realm of unconfirmed plans and unanswered questions!

I can't explain it other than that I felt like there was this invisible thing weighing me down, preventing me from writing even a short sentence, and just the thought of it made me almost sick to my stomach. It really was like a block of some sort. Someone really ought to come up with a word for that. Other than "macaroni guilt", I mean.

By then I was back in the all too familiar waters of hating everything I'd ever written, and knowing with absolute certainty that anything I would ever commit to paper in the future would be complete and utter shit and would probably start World War III somehow, but now there was the added element of knowing I had alienated my entire audience, all seven of them, and I would have to start over completely from scratch, and besides, there wasn't anything going on in my life worth writing about anyway, since I was no longer depressed or very anxious or coming up with absurd coping strategies for my crippling self doubt. I mean, sure, I had just taken a giant leap I still can't quite believe I somehow had the courage to take and moved in with a bunch of complete strangers based on some vague hope of being part of something unique and beautiful, but who wants to read about that, am I right? Everyone knows nothing profound was ever written by someone who was even remotely happy.

Slowly but surely though, I could feel myself starting to feel whole again. Because I did leap and landed flat on my face but I got up again and suddenly it was August and I had been living here for 5 whole months and learned so much in those months that I can't for the life of me believe that it has only been 5 months (well, it has been 6 by now), because in that time I went through so many emotions that they feel like a decade's worth. There have been bonfires and parties and projects and dancing in the kitchen and even more crying, and a couple of weeks that were so bad I genuinely started looking for apartments because I couldn't take it anymore. But I decided to stay, and somehow, against all expectations, I came out the other side of that knowing myself a little bit better, and feeling yet a little bit more like me.
I learned about what I can do, and I learned about people, which is really my favorite topic and always has been.
I learned that getting over someone isn't the linear process you hope it'll be, but comes in waves just like everything else, until you wake up one day and realize you haven't felt that pain in a while now, and you are no longer angry but just glad you both got out of that without hating each other.
I learned that I am so much stronger than I thought, and am only just beginning to tap into what I could someday be.
I discovered that I do, finally, genuinely love myself.

And somewhere in between all that, I also let go of my macaroni guilt.

I am leaping again now, back into the blogging realm, which is quite honestly more like a hop, because it's just a stupid blog you guys, even though not having anything planned out properly and not really knowing where I'm going to go with this does scare me just as much as it always has. But I missed it, and I missed you, so I'm here.

Let's not make it so long this time.

I guess all that is certain at this point is that there will be STUFF.